PODC 2000 Tutorial

In this tutorial, I will focus on the roles, types, and issues of middleware.  I will give a short overview of the software problems that middleware addresses and (mostly) solves.  I will do a survey of the different kinds of middleware and their applicability to diverse problem domains.  I will spend somewhat longer discussing, with examples, CORBA, RMI, and Jini, in particular pointing out relative strengths and weaknesses.  Finally, I will discuss some of the major and outstanding research issues, especially those that a PODC audience might find stimulating, and suggest where and how solutions might be found.

---

Biographical Sketch

Michael Ogg has spent several years both building distributed applications based on middleware, and researching diverse aspects of middleware systems.  This work has taken him to the University of Texas, where he co-ordinated the Nile project, Bell Labs, where he explored the applicability of Jini as a middleware framework, and most recently to Synaptus, Inc. where as founder and Chief Technology Officer he is leading the development of a suite of middleware services and tools.  Before focusing on middleware, he was an experimental particle physicist, albeit with a concentration on scientific computing, and played a role in the development of the Web and the Internet in Canada.  He received his D.Phil. from Oxford University in 1981.